CURRENTS: SCANDINAVIA -- ARCHITECTURE

CURRENTS: SCANDINAVIA -- ARCHITECTURE; Leonardo, if You Could Only Have Lived to See This Day

By PETER HALL

Published: November 8, 2001

Correction Appended

In 1502, Leonardo da Vinci designed a sweeping stone bridge (drawing, right) to span the Golden Horn inlet in Istanbul. It would have connected the last bit of Europe to the first bit of Asia, but the design was rejected by the Turkish sultan, who thought it technologically impossible. Five hundred years later, the bridge has finally opened -- in a small town in Norway. The Norwegian artist Vebjorn Sand saw Leonardo's tiny drawing of the bridge in 1995. ''I just fell in love with the design,'' he said, ''and was amazed that it had never been built.'' Mr. Sand persuaded the Norwegian Public Roads Administration to build a 190-foot timber version of the bridge so pedestrians could cross a highway in the town of As. The bridge (above, before teak and stainless steel railings were added) was built by the architect Knut Selberg of Trondheim and the Moelven Group structural engineers at a cost of $1.47 million. ''I am very proud of the result -- taking a sketch from Leonardo da Vinci and translating it into a modern laminated wood-arch construction,'' Mr. Selberg said. He called it ''an interpretation of the original.'' Queen Sonja opened it officially last week. Mr. Sand said that the bridge was the first civil engineering scheme by Leonardo to be realized. Its elegant, pressed-bow form is based on an engineering principle that was not generally accepted until the 1800's. Mr. Sand now wants to put a Leonardo bridge on every continent. The bridge, he said, ''has a Renaissance man's dual way of thinking and at the same time touches on something eternal.'' PETER HALL

Photos (Terje Johannsen)

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Correction: November 15, 2001, Thursday Because of an editing error, a report in the Currents column last Thursday about a bridge designed by Leonardo da Vinci to be built in Istanbul referred incorrectly to the Golden Horn, the body of water the bridge was intended to span. The Golden Horn is an inlet of the Bosporus whose shores lie entirely in Europe. It is the Bosporus itself that separates Europe and Asia.